Portrait of a Murderer by Anne Meredith is published as part of the series of reprints by the British Library. It is advertised as a Christmas Crime Story, and it is true that the murder takes place during the festive season, but it is nowhere as cosy a story as you might expect from the sub-title and the snowy scene on the cover. This book, which was originally published in 1933, is a clever piece of writing which shows the attitudes and motivations of a number of suspects, all of whom might have murdered Adrian Gray.
Gray is the patriarch of a large family but he isn’t popular. Few of the family members like each other and, by the end of the book, the reader isn’t too fond of any of them either. The main suspects are his six children, all of whom have a motive and all of whom are keeping secrets. I did find that there were a lot of characters to keep track of, especially in the early stages of the story, so I suggest that you dedicate a decent amount of time to reading a large chunk of the book at the start in order to get them established in your head.
The author reveals the murderer to the reader quite early on in the story so a lot of the enjoyment in reading this book is watching the characters suspect each other and, on occasion, try to frame each other for the murder. The interest for the reader is in how the murderer will be discovered and whether anyone can prove how he committed the crime.
This is clever and satisfying, although it does suffer from reflecting the popular world view of the 1930s and some nasty antisemitism is included. I enjoyed it a lot and I loved the way that the author turned upside down the usual method of telling a crime story.
Anne Is Reading 